Shadi Al-Atallah, Nancy Allen, Charlie Billingham, Luca Bosani, James Capper, Ollie Dook, Levi Draper, Billy Fraser, Alia Hamaoui, Byzantia Harlow, Andrew Pierre Hart, Serena Huang, Louis Judkins, Millie Layton, Ralph Hunter-Menzies, Finnian Mckenna, Rebecca Molloy, Polly Morgan, Jesse Pollock, Tom Ribot, George Rouy, Rhiannon Salisbury, Luke Samuel, Victor Seaward, Sanne Maloe Slecht, Mitch Vowels, Jim Woodall

Co-curated with Billy Fraser & James Capper

23 February - 15 May 2019
Spit & Sawdust, London

Green as the light decay has bred
From festering Death's the radiance shed
By her who dances in my head!

- Florence Folsom, Absinthe; Love Lyrics, 1899

Absinthe. Curious love of the sordid and the extravagant. Muse of the weird, twisted and eerie. Throughout its short history, absinthe has passed from antiseptic to vermicide, honorary salute to morphological being. It is ghostly and mutinous. It is no surprise that absinthe has long persisted in the underground, from Joyce to Baudelaire, Rimbaud to van Gogh. It was prolific amongst artists and writers of the boulevards of modern Paris: mystic visions of the Moulin Rouge, images that bled from their canvas with an emerald sorcery: hypnotic, aberrant and erotic.

Comprising 4 major exhibitions of emerging artists over the course of 12 months, ABSINTHE is a hybrid, eclectic, and at points inexplicable presentation of the weirder side of London’s emerging art scene. Located at the Spit & Sawdust pub, Bermondsey, each exhibition will present a mandala of artists that cut and splice between mediums and styles; a kaleidoscopic trip into the city’s current alternative art practices. ABSINTHE §1 will present the work of 27 London- based artists, a fortnightly live events programme and an inaugural ABSINTHE publication.

On the occasion of our first opening, ABSINTHE presents a late evening of art, sound, performance and music; and of course, our ceaselessly seditious, metamorphic and delectable demiurge itself: absinthe. Swirling inside its harlequin eyes is a potent concoction of macerated herbs, wormwood, aniseed and fennel. Served through the ritual of La Louche, its billowing stomach creates a seeing stone, endowing its subject with fantasies beyond control: hallucinations, delusions and fever-dreams.

To drink absinthe is to taste magic. To pull back the curtain and see the other-worldly, the hidden and the clandestine. It is the love-drunk clamour of a birdsong after dark; a trill screech of obscenity from deep within the jungle. The 27 artists of ABSINTHE §1 are each in their own way nightingales of the city; eccentric and progressive voices in the London art scene, together representing the curious side of what it means to make art today.

︎︎︎Event, ABSINTHE Poetry Night, curated by Finnian Mckenna (Saturday 6 April 2019) 
︎︎︎Event, ABSINTHE Film Night: Binge Watch, curated by Ollie Dook (Wednesday 17 April 2019)
︎︎︎Event, ‘ABSINTHE’, feature show on ‘The Monthly Howl’ on Soho Radio (14 March 2019)
︎︎︎Press, ‘ ABSINTHE   — Review by Lara Monroe ’ in Coeval Magazine (online, 2019)
︎︎︎Publication, ABSINTHE §1 (London: Elam Publishing, 2019).
︎︎︎Residency, Absent Minded Residency Programme, organised by Collective Ending (3 - 10 June 2019)